The voice of Misogynist Mike is the third fake identity I will assume for this blog. I’m trying to use these three voices to illustrate the various failings common to men who have no conception of feminism, or their own privilege in a world they dominate unthinkingly.
All men are misogynists whether they care to admit it or not. They have no control over it, and have not freely chosen to be misogynists. But there is no credible way to deny that in our western culture that white men are the top of the pecking order. But Misogynist Mike will deny it to his dying day, all the while insisting on everyone treating him as if it were true.
It’s the same way with racism, but while this blog is interested in racism, it is only from the standpoint of how racism shares awareness and oppression with the more universal problem of feminism. (I think years of considering racism and my sincere desire to reduce it in my life made it easier to understand feminism when I finally started to get, by the way) So racism is never off topic if it can relate in some way to helping men understand they are on top, and everyone else knows it.
Misogynist Mike is the kind of guy who would shut down the discussion in a heartbeat if he even heard the word misogynist. He loves being a manly man and hates fags, because they are like women. He claims to love women, because he loves sex so much, but hates marriage and “high maintenance” women and has no use for women who are less than attractive. Mike likes to hang out with his friends almost as much as he likes women, because only among men can he feel and express himself freely. He sees no connection between this inclination (towards emotional intimacy with men) and his own hatred of women, which he denies. He will freely admit that he doesn’t understand women and complain bitterly that they don’t understand him, and that the nature of women is responsible for this problem, not him.
Mike is also pornsick, of course, and tends to demand and expect porn-styled sex from his casual partners. He is not a completely pathetic loser like Pornsick Pat; his viewpoint is more that of the man who patterns his sex life after porn delusions. Pornsick Pat thinks he can compartmentalize his porn use away from the rest of his emotional and sexual life, since the two are so dissimilar, while Mike thinks porn is what life can be if he just finds a woman who has some sense. Mike shows us how men use sex to get what he wants from women.
Mike is the voice that you can scream at on this blog, though I expect you all to discuss him from any and all angles you want. But just think; on this blog there will be three fake voices for you to argue with who will never argue back. Since they don’t really exist, the women and feminist-identifying men who get past my slow moderation will be able to address him with the highest level of freedom they can manage.
thebewilderness | 05-Oct-07 at 9:04 pm | Permalink
“All men are misogynists whether they care to admit it or not. They have no control over it, and have not freely chosen to be misogynists.”
I do not agree with you on this point. Every person has an opportunity, on a regular basis, to measure the myths they live by against reality.
Antares | 06-Oct-07 at 2:24 am | Permalink
I’ve been reading you for a good long while on twisty’s site, appreciating your earnestness. It’s good to see youre giving form to your collection of insightful thoughts.
***
While I agree with what bewilderness said, its also true that men are brainwashed from the womb as women are. in the same way we havent chosen to be oppressed, daMenz havent chosen to be conditioned to be woman-haters.
Fred | 06-Oct-07 at 6:55 am | Permalink
Dear bewilderness,
I have to agree with you, because I’m a man. I would desperately like to believe that I am not a misogynist. And I do everything in my limited power to try to transcend the evil environment of misogyny we were all born into. But I still worry that it’s so pervasive that I will never even know the full extent of it, so I resign myself to just aspiring to a state of humanity that rejects any obvious sexism I can detect in myself.
I hope that by accepting our unconscious misogyny men will get over the defensiveness they constantly exhibit whenever it is pointed out to them by women who know more than they do about it (for the obvious reason that it’s easier to feel oppression if you’re oppressed than if you are an unthinking oppressor) and learn that the proper reflex is “I didn’t know that, but now I see what you mean” rather than the typical “I am not a sexist/misogynist/asshole!”
thebewilderness | 06-Oct-07 at 10:09 pm | Permalink
It was the “no control over it” bit that I was addressing. Sorry I wasn’t clear.
bradylord | 07-Oct-07 at 5:56 pm | Permalink
It’s all true. Men are misogynists. But, if you “ladies” want to get some perspective on just how damn lucky we “girls” are, here in the West, check this out:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/world/africa/07congo.html?ex=1349409600&en=f9e3e9a3cd5274f3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&e
This article made me sick. And, it reminded me that, even though the gender wars will never be over, at least, living here in the good ol USA, we females are allowed to find a way to prevail. The women in this article have nothing but a living nightmare to look forward to.
Also, I want to state that this idea that women can be financially dependant on men, once they’ve had children, and then demand to be viewed as equals, is a very big part of why we are not taken seriously. I have been involved in a business for the last five years that is the very definition of cutthroat, vicious and ugly, yet, highly profitable. And, this tradeoff is something that men take for granted.
Most women would pull out their fingernails before enduring what I’ve put up with, but, this is what it takes. Along with it has come the need to genuinally pay attention to the economic impact of Fed rates, high priced oil, shifts in job number reports, the S&P, China, India, emerging markets, the value of the dollar, etc. You cannot begin to effect social change if you refuse to get into the thick of it, ECONOMICALLY. (FYI, in my opinion, most political discourse is just chattering class distraction. War is always about money, after all.) And, women, highly educated, smart women, keep running away from business and back into the warm embrace of mommyhood. Sure it’s more satisfying! Sure, it’s rewarding! But, it’s the reason why no one sees us as players. Because we are too focused on being sexy or being mommies. Until we become mistresses of the universe, we will continue to embrace our own oppression.
There was an article in TIME recently about how full time dads and working dedicated dads have to learn to deal with being seen as UNMANLY by their part-time and non dad breathern. Well, what applies to those dedicated dads, also applys to dedicated moms. We are NOT viewed as equals. We are not giving 200% where it really counts!
Now, I’m not saying that no women should have children. But, more women should feel free to go the childless route and build ball busting careers. Or, use their empty nest years to get out there and stop taking prisoners. Look at Hillary Clinton. I keep hearing how manly and hard she seems. HUH? I see a razor sharp woman who may become our first female president. How come a self possessed, fiercely intelligent woman is demonized as being so hard? BECAUSE NOT ENOUGH WOMEN ARE BRAVE ENOUGH TO SHOW THE WORLD THIS SIDE OF THEMSELVES.
And, you can hate me all you want for saying this, but, it’s the truth. So, toughen the hell up, accomplish more and whine less. If you’ve got the cojones, the world we are privileged enough to live in is now your oyster.
bonobobabe | 07-Oct-07 at 8:07 pm | Permalink
I’m looking forward to reading this blog. This is a great idea. I love the idea of your alter egos.
I agree with bradylord. I despise the idea of women being financially dependent on men. It needs to stop. We need to stop being victims.
I respect the rules of blogs and forums where I’m not allowed to criticize women for doing whatever they need to do to get by in a patriarchy, but I don’t agree with it. We’re not supposed to criticize a woman for colluding with her own oppression, EVEN IF SHE’S AWARE OF IT, but we’re allowed to rail against men for being misogynists, EVEN OF THEY ARE TOTALLY UNAWARE OF WHAT THEY ARE DOING. Patriarchy is like the air and water. It’s the atmosphere. It takes a lot to finally see it for what it is.
I think this whole let’s-not-criticize-the-women is all about maintaining our status as victims.
I know it’s hard. I’m still working on some things myself. No one is perfect. But we’ve got to try. You know, sometimes I’m lonely as hell. But when I go out in public and see a man verbally abuse his girlfriend, I get a lot less lonely real quick! I’d rather experience occasional pangs of loneliness than experience abuse. I hate having to work for a living, but when I hear about yet another woman whose husband left her, and she’s stuck with kids to raise and no prospects for a job, then I hate my work a lot less real quick.
It’s hard, but it’s necessary to do what we need to do to stay as free as possible
Misogynist Mike | 08-Oct-07 at 1:24 am | Permalink
Bradylord is right. Women need to become more like men! That’s what wrong with them. But if they did, then they might take over the world and treat us mens like they are being treated right now. And we men wouldn’t like that, because we are not naturally submissive and pretty and stuff.
Fred | 08-Oct-07 at 1:39 am | Permalink
I hate to break it to you, bonobobabe, but this blog is not a forum for breaking the tough news to women that it’s their fault they haven’t figured out how to live in this misogynist world. It’s more about making men understand that their rights are privileges, and that these privileges they take for granted are very different when examined from outside the cocoon of a world where being a man is the default state.
It’s also a place where women can figure out how to rebut in context typical male arguments against feminism.
I’m not against encouraging women to get what they need to live and thrive in this world. But it always has the slight stink of patronage coming from a man.
It’s just like a white guy telling a black guy how all he has to do is play the race card and get out there and get what he wants. Like it’s so easy for white guys, it must be even easier for someone with the advantage of being discriminated against. Such arguments and viewpoints make race more important, when the more important goal is to make race more invisible, and even less important.
cg | 08-Oct-07 at 9:41 am | Permalink
Doesnt mike ever get the last word? :)
Isn’t it funny how the argument that the solution to patriarch oppression is achievement and competition with men always boils down to talk about testicles?
Fred | 08-Oct-07 at 2:30 pm | Permalink
It makes me think that such arguments are all about making the world a more manly place for men. Misogynist Mike would be quite confused by the implication that that might not be good thing!
thebewilderness | 08-Oct-07 at 4:54 pm | Permalink
“Also, I want to state that this idea that women can be financially dependant on men, once they’ve had children, and then demand to be viewed as equals, is a very big part of why we are not taken seriously.”
So on the one hand we have bradylord(a troll I remember well) claiming that it is being financially dependent on another person that prevents women from being equal humans. On the other hand we have Mis Mike who is quite certain that women were born that way.
TP, it appears that you are going to get what you wanted, though perhaps not the way you wanted it.
Fred | 08-Oct-07 at 7:13 pm | Permalink
The palpable anger of bradylord has harshed my buzz. Bye!
Louise | 08-Oct-07 at 9:43 pm | Permalink
I don’t believe you are ever going to have perfect equality between the sexes because men and women have different priorities. Women are more likely to want to stay at home and raise the children than men are. Women who do this are not ‘running away’ they are following their own instincts to put first what is important to them. Men tend to be more focused on their careers (or jobs, many men don’t have careers either).
It’s not some sinister patriarchal conspiracy that keeps women from wanting to rush off and have careers, it’s their own inclinations. Whenever surveys are carried out on whether women with children would prefer to work full time, part time, or stay at home full time, if they could choose, part-time work always seems to come out top. Most women would prefer to keep a foot in both the world of work and the world of home,if it was financially viable. They’d like a bit of money of their own, but they want to be able to spend timed with the kids as well.
In past centuries, when most people worked in or near their own homes,it was more common for the worlds of home and work to be blended rather than seperated, and most women were involved in business as well as homemaking (whether or not they wanted to be is another matter).
Personally, I am quite happy to be financially dependent on my husband, since it means I don’t have to worry about who is going to look after the kids etc whileI’m at work. I don’t want to have to spend my time worrying about what is going to happen to them while I’m at work. I’d rather be able to pick them up from school, come home and relax with them, play games, help them with their homework.
There are women who are able to focus on their careers and be ‘ball-breakers’ but many women simply are not suited to that sort of life. they’re more interested in their families. I come into this category. A lot of women simply do not want to be ‘ball-breakers’.
Louise
Thanatos02 | 09-Oct-07 at 8:00 am | Permalink
The issue of work vs. home always seemed exceptionally complicated to me, but not really so complicated that the issues it presented couldn’t be worked out. Part of the issue, I believe, is a culture that stigmatizes raising children and staying in the home as something that needs to be done but is, paradoxically, worth less then earning money in the business world.
Raising children is also seen as ‘women’s work’, which seems like a chicken-and-egg situation where I try to figure out if raising children or taking care of the home is deemed lesser because women do it (and so women are deemed less then men) or if women are deemed less then men (so raising children is also less then ‘men’s work’).
Either way, they’re conflated together now. Louise, I think what you’re talking about might be a culturally-created division where many women are taught since childhood to stay at home and disuaded from entering the business world, and so once they become adults, they think that’s the natural order of things.
What I do know is that once I graduated school, my first thought was, “How do I get a good job to provide for family and friends.” I don’t even like to work, I’d rather write all day or take care of the house. But I also know what I’ve been taught – a man is worthless without a job. I think women have been culturally brainwashed in the same way, but they have it worse because their cultural role is deemed lesser by some idiotic convention.
I mean, please feel free to put me in my place and all (since I’m talking about the gender role of a group I don’t have first-hand experience with), but I also feel that culture is a powerful force. And the one we’re stuck with, for now, is toxic.
Louise | 09-Oct-07 at 9:01 am | Permalink
The thing about the ‘cultural brainwashing’ theory of why women want to stay at home with the kids is that it is pretty well universal that women tend to be the carers of children. When something is universal I think the possibility has to be considered that it is that way because that’s what suits people best, because it’s how nature has designed us.
Among mammals, it’s the female of the species that looks after the young. This is obviously practical because in the early years the female is the only one who can feed the child. In hunter-gatherer societies, which are i believe the form of society that most people lived in for most of human existence, it is the females who gather plant food while the men go off hunting, because gathering is a lot easier to do when you have a young child in tow. Hunting while lugging a squawling baby or whining toddler around is impossible.
In medieval times, women tended to be involved in economic activities, either working in the fields alongside their husbands, or being involve din the family business, whatever it was. Some women were in business on their own account. Certain activities were traditionally female, like brewing ale for instance, the ale-wife was a familiar figure in medieval society. In the early years of the settling of America, women’s barter economy was vital to the survivial of the early settlers. The seperation of home and workplace that evolved in the early modern period led to a rapid decline in the number of women engaged in business, and women increasingly were supposed to devote themselves to home and children rather than to any kind of economic activity. Whether women actually found this a curse or a blessing I have no idea, our modern tendency to think that everyone wants to be working at some job rather than being at home with the family may not have been shared by women in olden times, it is impossible to say for sure.
Modern civilisation has given women options to not have children, to pursue careers, or to have children and still continue working. it is remarkable, though, that in spite of having these choices, large numbers of women in Western society still choose to put their families first, and any work they do comes second to the demands of family. I think people should be free to choose how they want to spend their lives, but I am not convinced that women who stay at home with their children, or who do only part-time work instead of pursuing a ball-breaking career, are doing so because they have been conditioned to do it, rather than because they want to.
Society seems, as far as i can make out, to encourage women to pursue careers, we are bombarded by images of succesful career-women in films TV shows, advertising etc. I don’t get the feeling that society is conditioning women to stay at home, on the contrary it appers to me to be discouraging that as much as possible. nevertheless women continue to do it. I think civilisation can do something to counteract natural instincts, but it can never suppress them entirely, and it seems that the instinct to concentrate on children rather than career is very strong for a lot of women.
Louise
Notorious Ph.D. | 10-Oct-07 at 5:35 pm | Permalink
Louise, I’m glad you’ve found a way of life that offers maximum fulfillment for you. But please remember that the keywords here are for you. Feminisms differ, but in general, feminists of just about every stripe are struggling for women’s self-determination. If for you, that means stay home with the kids and let someone else bring home the bacon (or tofu), fine. But please do not impute your legitimate choice to an instinct that “all women” feel.
And please, for the sake of common courtesy, do not equate a desire to find fulfillment outside the domestic realm with “ball breaking.” That is a tired, antifeminist charicature worthy of our friend Mysogynist Mike [see, TP, I came back to the point!]. My career satisfaction, and preference for being an aunt rather than a mother, does not make me a man-hater, or less of a woman. It just makes me me.
Notorious Ph.D. | 10-Oct-07 at 7:20 pm | Permalink
(and, once again, I need to learn to proofread. ::sigh::)
Fred | 11-Oct-07 at 8:35 am | Permalink
Society encourages women to have careers so they can be exploited twice over, not because they want women to be free. Being a wage slave means you are less free, not more free.
Of course, it’s nice that thousands of American women – high income, of course – are now more free to live without he support of a man. It’s a slight balance to the millions of women – of all incomes, but think of the poor – who are now expected to slave at home and on the job.
My friend misogynist Mike often tells me how lucky I am to have a wife to support me. If he had a wife making enough money he’d be out getting laid by other women all the time while she ran the house and paid the mortgage. He’s a bit of a pimp at heart. And he would guffaw loud and proud if I told him to his face!
I always cringe at the idea that an artificial construct such as culture has these ‘natural’ tendencies that can’t, presumably, be changed. Your Nigel would be very pleased at such sensible arguments, which need no foundation in fact other than the facts provided by those who devote themselves to proving them right by creating theoretical constructs to support them.
I should do a post about natural facts. Twisty has done it so much better than I could that I would need to go back and study her comments on it first. She is my guru.
thebewilderness | 11-Oct-07 at 9:20 pm | Permalink
“When something is universal I think the possibility has to be considered that it is that way because that’s what suits people best, because it’s how nature has designed us.” sez louise
On the other hand, if it were natural, it would not have been necessary to enforce compliance by law. Indeed, after hundreds of years of forced compliance, it is insulting to claim that there is anything natural about the universality of the limitations of womens choices. The limitations of womens choices, to submit, or die, is an affront to nature and to God.
Louise | 13-Oct-07 at 10:08 pm | Permalink
When I used the phrase ‘ball breaker’, I was quoting from an earlier comment. it is not an expression I was familiar with until I read this comment.
Nor did i say that because I liked staying at home that it what all women should do. I suggested that it seems to be the situation that women in general are more interested in staying home to raise the children, when they have the opportunity. I don’t see any evidence at all that this is not the case.
Society generally seems to be anxious to seperate women from their children when they can, rather than encouraging them to stay with them. In Sweden, for instance, where they have a very generous parental leave allowance, they haven’t had much luck in persuading men to stay at home with the children. So now apparently they are planning to make paternity leave compulsory, so that men will have to stay at home with the children, and women will have to go back to work, regardless of whether that is what they want. This is not going to be good for the men, the women, or the children. Who stays at home and raises the children (if either do) is a matter that should be arranged privately, it isn’t something you should legislate for. Forcing women back to work when they’d rather be at home, and forcing men to stay at home when they’d rather be at work, is a reciple for disaster for all concerned.
In industrialised western societies, nobody is stopping women from going out to work if they want to, in fact they are actively encouraged to do so, whether they have children or not. The fact remains that a lot of women are more interested in focusing on their families than on careers or jobs. Why are so many high-powered women quitting their jobs to stay at home with their families, as was remarked on in an earlier comment?
To suggest that there is nothing natural about women’s desire to stay with their children is ridiculous. It is nature, not society, that has made women the ones to have babies, and to be responsible for raising them. It is a limitation imposed by old Stepmother Nature, not by society. Civilisation encourages women to get out to work, but it’s nature that gives some of them at leas the desire to pack it in and go home to the kids.
Louise
thebewilderness | 14-Oct-07 at 8:27 pm | Permalink
Louise,
There is a vast amount of information and evidence out there. The fact that you are ignorant of it does not mean it does not exist.